UK Borders Bill

moved Amendment No. 27A: 27A: After Clause 21, insert the following new Clause— ““Immigration control: age assessment by ionising radiation No person claiming to be a child shall be subjected to ionising radiation for the purpose of age assessment in connection with immigration control.”” The noble Lord said: My Lords, I certainly hope that the Minister will not avoid the responsibility of giving me an answer on this amendment on the grounds that it will be dealt with in the plan of action following the consultation on UASC, which is now not going to appear until the end of November, even though the report on the consultation was originally promised by the end of August. While I can just about understand the Government’s need to work out some of the details regarding the specialist authorities, the technical problem of age determination is a self-contained issue that could be settled independently of the general framework of the procedures for dealing with UASC. Although the Minister appeared to think that I was suggesting that dental X-rays should be used subject to guidelines, let me say again, as the wording of the amendment should make crystal clear, that I oppose the use of ionising radiation for the purpose of age determination, full stop. The guidelines I was talking about in my speech on 18 July were those developed by the London boroughs of Hillingdon and Croydon, which have been approved by the courts, and contain no mention of X-rays, as I would have thought the Minister's brief would have told him. The use of X-rays for age determination was stopped on 22 February 1982 by the then Home Secretary, Mr William Whitelaw, as he then was, following a report by my office, published in June 1981. The matter has been reviewed by Ministers once since then, in 1996, when there was correspondence between John Horam MP at the Department of Health and the late Baroness Blatch at the Home Office, when Mr Horam reaffirmed the stance taken in 1982. In 2003, the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health reaffirmed that it is inappropriate for X-rays to be used to assist in age determination for immigration purposes, and in response to the UASC consultation, this was again confirmed by leading professional opinion, including particularly the Children's Commissioner, Sir Al Aynsley-Green, himself a noted paediatric endocrinologist. It is unethical to use X-rays for non-clinical purposes just as it was in 1981—nothing has changed since then—and any supposed improvements in the accuracy of the process are irrelevant. As far as I know, the accuracy is still plus or minus two years, but that is for middle-class American children on whom the original work was done, and there are no base statistics on children coming from the main countries of origin, such as Somalia or Afghanistan, let alone on the adolescent populations of those countries. There are no averages or standard deviations of the measured characteristics of the children in those countries against which measurements of particular asylum seekers could be compared. The whole idea of assessing age by looking at the physical characteristics of unmeasured populations is bad science, worthy of an article by Mr Ben Goldacre in the Guardian. In our last debate, I referred the Minister to Dr Heaven Crawley’s analysis on asylum, age disputes and the process of age assessment, published by ILPA, and I hope that he has had the opportunity of reading that work, in which the use of X-rays is condemned but alternatives are developed. I sometimes wonder whether the consultations in which the Government engage are genuine, or designed to arrive at conclusions that they have already pre-determined. In this case, the overwhelming majority of expert professional opinion is against the use of X-rays, reasonable alternatives have been developed, and the proposal should be dropped. I beg to move.